Weekly Writing – May 13 2023

Being courted by a god of frost was mostly downsides. The first time she found a surprise blizzard on her doorstep, late in May, she assumed it was just the weather stumbling on its wobbling way to summer. It did that sometimes, though it didn’t usually land in such deep, plush drifts against her front windows.
When she still had icicles hanging from her eaves in mid-June, she finally arrived at the inescapable conclusion that something was wrong. And when the whorls of frost on her windows started to take the shape of hearts, she knew what. Still, what could she do about it? If the King of the Long Night, the Snow-Blind Beggar, the Blizzard and Quiet Death, had taken some kind of interest in her, whether it was love or hatred wouldn’t make much difference. The brave weeds in her yard froze into hoar-frost bouquets either way, and the black dirt of her garden, when she shovelled her way down to it, was hard as obsidian.
The love of spring and summer and autumn gods was ripe and fat, filling the belly and fields. But her besotted gave her what he had, all he had, and that meant staring out the top inch of her snowed-in windows at the drifts that melted away to green grass almost exactly at the edge of her property, and wondering if it would do her any good to move, or if she would just bring that little patch of winter with her to whatever tropics she ran to as a refuge from being loved so much.